Cappadocia
May 11, 2023
We spent today in the Cappadocia region of central Turkey. On our drive there, we stopped at a 1200’s AD Seljuk Caravansary - a safe stopping place, like an inn or hotel, on the Silk Road. Services here included caring for camels and horses and fixing leather goods.
The Cappadocia area is famous for its unusual rock formations and “fairy chimneys”. Volcanoes in this area over the millennia have laid down thick deposits of ash and sediment. Mountains of volcanic tuff were layered on top with basalt, then wind and erosion went to work and created the landscape we see today. The Tuff is very easy to carve and people have lived in cave houses and created underground cities and connecting tunnels since at least the Hittite times over 4,000 years ago. People continued to live in these cave dwellings - which keep a constant cool and low humid environment in all seasons, up until the 1960s. In early christian times, Christian communities hid from the Roman’s here and created churches underground. They have discovered over 100 underground cities. Some are only big enough for a few families and some could hold over 10,000 in times of danger. The city we toured goes down 10 levels and has areas for livestock, wine presses, kitchens, graves, churches , everything necessary to live hidden for as long as needed. The air shafts end in freshwater wells and were build in staggered directions so the water could not be poisoned. Derinkuyu is the underground city that we toured.
Near Derinkuyu is a very well preserved byzantine era church. It is all locked but we can peak in and take pictures around the grounds.
Next we went to the open air museum of Goeme - an area of rock cut monasteries, convents and churches with incredible Byzantine era frescos, and some areas with even older frescos. The most beautiful/ colorful chapels we were not allowed to photograph, even though Craig asked every single guard we came across, the answer never changed.
While Cappadocia isn’t a biblical site, we do read in 1st Peter that he is writing to the dispersed Christian’s in Cappadocia, and we have clues from 1st Peter that he dealt with the peoples of the more northern areas of Asia Minor/ Anatolia.
Several other stops we made were to hike around some of the rock formations and to visit a city where the residents originally lived in cave homes. There are cave hotels even - thankfully we aren’t staying in one of those!
Tomorrow we have a few early activities planned, then the whole group flies to Istanbul. The following day half of us head for the states, and 20 of us move on to Malta to visit the area of Paul’s shipwreck on his way to Rome as a prisoner.
